Stories from the Shatterdome
by FantasiaWandering
Summary: There are more stories from the New York Shatterdome than were told over the course of "Enemy of my Enemy." This story is a collection of tales about the Hamato clan, Angel, and the rest of the Shatterdome crew before, during, and after "Enemy of my Enemy." (Pacific Rim crossover)
1. Brain Trust

_This was originally published in Enemy of my Enemy, but it belongs over here. _

_This takes place before Enemy of my Enemy, and introduces a few elements that come to play in that story. _

* * *

**Brain Trust: A prequel**

_Winter 2016_

The wind was cold, biting into her skin as she stood on the roof of the Shatterdome, but she welcomed it. She needed a moment to gather herself. To embrace the silence after the overwhelming noise of the well-wishers inside. Sometimes, it surprised her how many friends she'd made while she and Donnie worked to get Shell Shocker ready to deploy. Friends were something she'd more or less given up on when she'd accepted the guys into her life.

She sighed, wrapping her arms around herself, and her birthday gift — a flight jacket with Mikey's newly-approved Shell Shocker logo proudly emblazoned on the front — kept out the worst of the chill.

They meant well. But in the over three years since the Kraang had strapped her into that machine, sometimes her head started getting very… crowded. She breathed in slowly, letting it go as she tried to figure out where _April_ began and ended.

"April?"

_Of course it's him_.

Taking another steadying breath, she turned with a smile. "Hey, Donnie. Sorry, I'm not being a very good birthday girl, am I?"

"No, no, I understand," he said, fidgeting a little. "It's just…." He reached into the pocket of his own flight jacket. "There wasn't really the right opportunity to give you this."

Her eyes widened as he pulled out a suspiciously small velvet box and held it out to her. She took it, her hands trembling as she fought against what she suspected was inside. "Donnie, you shouldn't—"

"Please, April," he said, and his voice was taught with nervousness. "Just… open it."

_Donnie, I swear to god, if this is a ring, I'm going to…._

But as the box opened with a little creak, her breath left her in a rush and the thought died unfinished as she stared at what the box contained.

The pendant lay nestled against dark velvet, shining like a small star in the glow of the searchlights that swept the bay for signs of kaiju. It was Mikey's Shell Shocker logo done in miniature, the shell carved of pale jade, each scute lovingly picked out in minute detail. The lightning bolt blazed across the shell in gleaming gold, supporting the golden circle that bore the four coloured gems at the cardinal points, one stone for each turtle.

She ran her fingers over it in mute shock. She had never really been one for jewellery, but this… this was perfect. And it didn't take a genius to figure out who had made it. "Donnie, I—"

"They think that insignia is all about us," he said quietly. "The shell. The colour points. But there's a fifth member of the family in there — Mikey made sure of that. The fifth pilot. The one who looks out for us and keeps the rest of us together." His fingertip brushed against the gold circle, and his dark eyes were solemn as they met hers. "Without you, we'd still be in those cages in that lab. A jacket… it wasn't really enough to say thank you for that."

His earnest face wavered and blurred, and she didn't trust her voice to answer. Instead, she turned her back to him and lifted her hair in silent invitation.

It took him several tries — the tiny clasp wasn't designed for turtle fingers, but he got it in the end. Donnie, after all, had very, very clever hands. And as the tiny shell came to rest just below the hollow of her throat, she let out another long breath and envisioned a wall around her mind, circling it like a protective gold ring.

And suddenly, blissfully, all the voices in her head fell silent.

"Did… did you wanna go back?" Donnie asked hesitantly.

In answer, April let herself lean back, coming to rest against the solid wall of his plastron. He jumped a little at that, and she smiled as she shook her head. "If it's okay, can we just stay here a while?"

After a moment, Donnie cleared his throat, and to his credit, there was only a tiny squeak in his voice when he answered. "Sure thing! You're the birthday girl."

But after that, he was silent, his arms coming around her from behind to keep the cold at bay as she closed her eyes, content in the knowledge that he understood. He was perfectly happy to just let her enjoy the silence. More than anyone else in the world, he understood just how long it had been in coming.

* * *

_Summer 2017_

The cybernetic circuitry of the thinking cap clung to him, and though he knew that the sweat currently pouring down his face wouldn't short it out, he fervently hoped that it would. He wanted something — _anything —_ to go wrong before this test was allowed to reach its conclusion.

_Drift compatible._ He and April tested off the charts. He knew that. But up until this point, there'd always been something to put it off. He was needed to fix some complex piece of equipment, or April was needed to analyze kaiju movement patterns.

But now Takahashi had put his foot down. Quantum Bravo was just sitting in the bay gathering dust, and they needed another strong team to take the Mark II out. So here he was, wired into the pons next to April and praying for the sky to fall.

_Neural bridge initiation in three…. two…_

There was a flash of light, and klaxons began to scream throughout the Shatterdome. The synthesized voice of the AI aborted the countdown, and began a new pattern.

_Movement detected in the Breach. New York seaboard trajectory confirmed. Shell Shocker, report for drop._

"YES!" Donnie shouted, pumping his fist. Only then did he remember that he wasn't alone, and met the stunned gazes of his family. "Uh… I mean… boo?"

With a whoop, Mikey jumped from his perch on a control panel and darted past. "Leo, my man, we're up, bro! Let's _dance!_"

Leo followed Mikey quietly, shaking his head as he passed. Raph was close behind Leo, but paused next to Donnie, and Donatello couldn't help but flinch as the intensity of Raph's gaze met his.

"Get it together, Donnie," Raph said, looking after Leo's retreating back. "We need another team out there. We can't let 'em carry it alone." His expression hardened. "Especially _him_."

With that, Raph followed after their brothers, leaving Donnie and April to be freed from the circuitry suits by the waiting ground crews. Donnie glanced over at April, meeting her questioning look with a sheepish shrug, but he said nothing.

How could he admit that he was afraid to let the person he was most drift compatible with see what was in his head? And that he was even more afraid to see what was… or wasn't… in hers...


	2. 3 am

_This takes place shortly after "Enemy of my Enemy" ends._

* * *

**3 am**

The problem with living on a military base — well, it wasn't really military, but amounted to pretty much the same thing — was that there was never any chance to be alone. Never that quiet moment in the middle of the night when everyone else was sleeping and you could just be alone with your thoughts. And for someone whose brain was increasingly permeable to the thoughts of everyone else on base, April really _missed_ those moments.

The Shatterdome status screen on the opposite wall may have been in its muted nighttime mode, a reassuring "all clear" green, but that didn't stop her laser-corrected vision — funny, she'd never considered that you couldn't have a nearsighted Jaeger pilot — from having no trouble picking out the "3 AM" at the top of the screen.

Sighing, she pushed back the blankets and slipped on a pair of tennis shoes before clipping her ID to the hem of her tank top. Sleep wasn't coming any time soon, and her boxers and tank top were good enough for anyone else insane or unlucky enough to be awake at this hour. She briefly thought of waking Donnie, but he'd been up till the wee hours the night before yelling at Gottlieb again, and he needed his sleep. Her thoughts also drifted toward Casey for a moment, but that… that was still too new.

So instead, her restless feet led her to the deserted kitchen. Murakami had given her the freezer combination for just such an emergency, and she was looking forward to spending some quality time with Ben and Jerry…

…and Leo?

He blinked at the sudden light as April flipped the switch before giving her a sheepish look and sticking his spoon in his mouth so he could pat the counter next to him.

Pausing to grab a spoon on the way, April hoisted herself up beside him, digging her spoon into the proffered container of "Shell Shocking" — a specialty flavour the company had made in flagrant defiance of the rationing, which contained chocolate, peanut butter swirls, and chunks of caramel-pecan "turtles". The twelve donated crates of it were the Shatterdome's only source of chocolate, which was why Murakami had had to start locking the freezer.

Speaking of…

"I know for a fact that Murakami hasn't given the combination to anyone else," she mumbled around her spoon. "How did you—"

He raised a brow at her, and she gave a soft, exasperated snort. "Right. Ninja."

It was funny, but no matter how many times she saw it, she still wasn't used to seeing him without the mask. It still seemed wrong somehow. "You're naked," she pointed out. He'd clipped his ID to his dog tags, and they were his only attire.

He shrugged, and gave her a little grin. "Still not used to the clothes thing, I guess. Never occurs to me this late."

"You know it ticks Takahashi off when you guys run around in the buff."

"Good thing Takahashi has more sense than to be up this late, then." Leo dug his spoon into the ice cream again, nabbing one of the prime chunks of turtle before April's spoon could get to it and earning a cry of protest from her as he popped it smugly into his mouth.

Sticking her toungue out at him, she whacked him on his scarred shoulder with her spoon before dipping it back into the ice cream. "Speaking of," she said, and raised a brow at him. "Dreams again?"

His gaze went ever so slightly distant at that, and April winced inwardly. She'd only drifted with him once, but that had been enough to get a sense of exactly what had happened to him during the brief time she and the guys had been separated after the first kaiju attack, and it was more than enough to give _anyone_ nightmares. The record of it was still written across his skin, which remained marked with far more scars than his brothers. But he just nodded and shrugged again. "Not bad enough to get Mikey up. But bad enough." He tapped her lighly on the forehead with his spoon. "And you? Still hearing things?"

It was her turn to shrug. "Yeah. Can't get my brain to shut up, and I can't tell if it's me or the poor schmoes on the night shift. Donnie has some theories that it might get worse in cycles correlated to the breach, but I actually think it's gotten a bit better since we started Drifting. His brain is, like, crazy regimented to help him keep all that stuff he's got crammed in there from overwhelming him, and I think some of that is rubbing off. It helps, a little."

"I've been meaning to ask…" Leo took another spoonful, uncovering another massive chunk of turtle. This one he scooped up and offered to April instead. "How are things with you two?"

She accepted the turtle before he could change his mind, chewing on it thoughtfully as she considered his question. "Is this brother-Leo or leader-Leo asking?"

"Both."

April sighed, her free hand drifting up to toy with the Shell Shocker pendant she wore constantly. "Confusing. Amazing. I still catch him being sad sometimes, and I hate that he is, but at the same time, since Quantum Bravo, we're just so… so…."

"In the Drift?" Leo supplied.

She grinned. "Yeah. And it's, like… I haven't felt this _happy_ since the war started."

Her grin faltered a little, and her eagle-eyed leader didn't miss it. Of course. "April?"

"I just…" She looked down, her gaze tracing over the scars on his arms. "Sometimes I still feel like the war is my fault. The Kraang wouldn't have sent the kaiju if they hadn't been so focused on getting me back…"

Leo took her spoon from her hand and set it and his own aside in the empty ice cream container. "You know that's crazy talk, right?_"_ He shifted on the counter, eliminating the distance between them. "You're pretty much the only thing that's limiting them to sending one kaiju at a time and not flooding the whole planet with them all at once. The Kraang have been working on this a long time, April. If not you, there'd be some other diabolical scheme they'd be using to try to terraform the Earth. Only now you get to get in a Jaeger and fight back."

As his arm went around her, she gave a quiet laugh and leaned into his shoulder. "You're the only person I know who can use a phrase like "diabolical scheme" and make it sound natural."

"I have many talents," he said. "Hero dialogue is just one of them."

She shook her head and let out a long breath. Leo may have a lot of seriously messed-up stuff in his head, but being around him was like being in a room full of wind chimes and scented candles. It didn't make the crowding in her head go away, exactly, but it put a kind of soothing blue buffer between them. His right arm hugged her close to his side, but his left was draped across his lap, and she reached out to trace the scars left by the circuitry burns. His skin was a road map in many ways, the circuitry scars crossing old ones from his confinement, and older ones still from various fights with the Kraang and the Foot.

"…do you ever regret meeting me?" she asked quietly.

"Not for a second," he said, and she loved him for the fact that there was no hesitation is his voice when he said it.

She felt the warmth of his breath stir her hair just before he dropped a kiss on the top of her head. "Come on," he said, pushing himself off the counter and moving in front of her. "Let's get you back to bed."

Grabbing one of her arms, he tugged her off the counter onto his shell, holding her efficiently in place with one hand as he courteously dumped the ice cream container into the sink.

His hands now free, he hitched her into place and wandered out of the kitchen with her on his back, turning off the lights with an elegantly outstretched leg on the way past.

"Showoff," she muttered, and earned a laugh from him in return.

She wound her arms around his shoulders, and her fingers rested only a moment on the riveted hole in his shell.

_Not for a second._

Some days, she knew, it was a lie, albeit a kind one. But today was not one of those days. She knew that as surely as she knew that once he'd seen her safely back to bed, her big little brother would stay to watch over her, his soothing blue presence surrounding her until she finally fell asleep.


	3. The Remedy

_This story was bouncing around my head for a while, but it took an image from Brushbell to help me figure out how the ending worked. Thank you so much for that!_

* * *

**The Remedy**

Casey fidgeted in his seat, his sneakers scuffing at the grass as he tugged on the tie around his neck. The tie had been a stupid idea - he never should have listened to Raph. Moron. April was wearing a freaking hoodie, for crying out loud. Still, not even a hoodie could make April any less gorgeous, and the tie made Casey feel at least not _entirely_ out of place in the bright, flowery gardens.

He wasn't even sure their companion had enough attention to spare to actually notice what he was wearing, though at least he'd remembered Casey's name this time. After April had recounted their last visit, the turtles had called him 'Connie' for weeks. Still, he couldn't really hold it against the guy. Mr. O'Neil has a lot on his mind these days.

April's dad knelt next to her at the edge of the white sand of the zen garden, both of them animatedly messing up the carefully-traced patterns in the sand as they scribbled sciencey stuff in it, passing a stick April had pulled off a flowering crabapple tree back and forth between them.

"Fascinating," Mr. O'Neil said. "So if we could figure out a way to get past the mouth of the breach to _this _point-"

"We stand a chance at collapsing it for good," April finished. "At least, that's what Donnie thinks. He tried to talk to Gottlieb about it, but Hermann's still mad about the whole 'pea brained cave dweller' crack."

Mr. O'Neil shook his head. "I warned him that Gottlieb's got a temper. I got to know him pretty well when we were working up the Ranger profiles to back up the case for breaking the guys out of detention..." He trailed off, his eyes going momentarily distant as he gazed out over the gardens.

April rested a hand on her father's arm. "I think the problem is that they're too much alike. I'm going to see if I can call Hermann on my own to try to talk him 'round."

Kirby looked down at his daughter and smiled. "He'd be an idiot to say no to you." His expression softening, he took April's face between his hands. "Look at you, sweetie. When did you become such a smart, accomplished young woman?"

April's cheeks reddened beneath her freckles. "Daaa-ad!"

"I mean it." Mr. O'Neil looked up at Casey. "You count your blessings, Casey Jones."

"I do every day, sir," Casey replied.

"Good man," Mr. O'Neil said, laughing at his daughter's protests. The scientist's hair may have been shot through with grey, but he still knew how to get the best of his little girl, and before long, his cornball teasing had her crying with laughter.

It was then that an orderly across the yard dropped one of the trays he was carrying, the crash echoing over the sculpted flowerbeds.

Between one breath and the next, Mr. O'Neil was screaming. The laughter fled from her eyes, April reached for him desperately. "Dad, it's okay, it's fine. You're okay, Daddy, please-"

But it was too later. Mr. O'Neil was gone, lost to hysterics as he sobbed against his daughter's chest. April's face was wet, but her voice remained strong as she held her father, soothing him with gentle meaningless words as she rocked him until the doctors arrived at a run, sedatives in hand. Casey had to help them pry April's hands away as her father's gaze went distant. Her father was staring into her eyes, but they both knew that he wasn't seeing her any more.

_"He was the Kraang's prisoner for months," _April had told him the night he'd finally gotten up the nerve to ask where her father was. She'd tugged the blanket up further around her shoulders, toying absently with a fraying thread on the pillowcase to avoid looking at him as she spoke._ "I never really found out exactly what they did to him, but I know they experimented on him. Messed with his mind. He was in bad shape when we got him back, but I actually think he was doing better for a while..."_

And then the kaiju leveled their old neighbourhood. The guys had gotten them to safety, but a part of Mr. O'Neil had never made it out.

April stayed strong until her father was out of sight, and then Casey had to stand there and watch her just...fade. She never cried after one of these episodes. Just... turned inward. Way inward. Sighing, Casey placed an arm around her shoulders and led her back to the hospital's reception area.

"We'll try again next week, okay?"

She didn't answer. He didn't expect her to, but her arms were almost painfully tight around his waist as he wove the bike through the late afternoon traffic, heading back to the Shatterdome.

He didn't know what to do to fix her dad. But at least he knew the remedy for what was ailing April.

The Shatterdome was cold and damp in the autumn. They assured him it would get better as the winter set in and the tightwads holding the purse strings finally broke down and turned the heat on, but for now they were deep in their "energy saving measures." Which meant that the guys tended to do the turtle thing nap a lot when they weren't training.

Sure enough, he found the turtle he was looking for bundled up in a hoodie and dozing on a bench in the lounge, the book he'd been reading when he'd fallen asleep lying at his feet.

Casey grabbed the bo leaning against the doorframe and crossed the room, towing April behind him. When he reached a safe distance, he stopped and prodded Donnie in the side "Yo, braniac. Wake up."

Donnie moved before Casey could blink, his hand lashing out in a green blur and yanking the bo from his hand.

One of the first things Casey had learned about living with the guys. When trying to wake a sleeping ninja, always use a stick.

The rest of Donnie woke up a few moments after his ninja reflexes did, and he blinked muzzily up at them. "Huh? Wha?"

Placing his hands gently on April's shoulders, Casey propelled her toward Donatello. "It happened again. Fix this."

Donnie's eyes focused at last on April. He didn't say a word. Just held out his hands. Casey's were still on her shoulders, and he could feel the tremor that ran through her as her inner barriers snapped and she collapsed against her co-pilot.

The worst part, Casey thought as he moved around the lounge, putting Donnie's bo and book back in their proper places, was the fact that she never made a sound. Just shook as she wept silently into Donnie's chest. Donnie never said anything either; he just held her, stroking her hair, and let whatever it was that kept them so strong in the Drift do its thing.

By the time Casey found a blanket to cover them, April was sound asleep in Donnie's arms. That was pretty much par for the course, too; because of the weird thing her brain did, she found the constant emotional barrage of hospitals exhausting at the best of times. Donnie appeared to have conked out, too, but one brown eye cracked open as Casey returned bearing two cups of the terrible lounge coffee, and he held out his hand with a look of grateful relief as Casey passed one to him.

"Thanks," Donnie said. He didn't mean the coffee.

"You too." Sinking down on the bench with a quiet groan, Casey glanced over at his sleeping girlfriend. Her face was still tear streaked, but at least that horrible tension had eased out of her. He hated seeing her like this. It was so much harder when there was nothing he could punch to make it better. Shuddering, he took a sip of the horrible cofffee. "You think it's ever gonna get better?"

Donnie winced as he lowered his own cup, glaring in pained effrontery at the sludge within. "I hope so. His is a bad case, but post-traumatic stress treatments have come a long way since the first world wars."

"Bet they didn't have to deal with aliens, though."

"No," Donnie said slowly. "No, that would be new." Giving up on the coffee, he passed the cup back to Casey. "Still..." He glanced down at April, who was beginning to drool onto his hoodie. "He's got the best incentive in the world right here."

"And she's got us," Casey said.

Though Casey often found the Shatterdome's resident genius confusing and impossible to understand, that wasn't the case this time. They may not always get along, or even understand one another, but on one thing, they were both in perfect, drift-compatible accord.

Donnie smiled. "Always."


End file.
